Posts by Idiot Savant
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Stephen: Yes it does; the statistic quoted is for "Investments with Other Financial Institutions", which "includes shares, managed funds (unit trusts, group investment funds, etc), fixed interest investments, securities or bonds, syndicated investments, etc".
But these are old figures, and as Danyl pointed out, Kiwisaver will be changing them significantly. Not that that changes the conclusion: b is almost certainly false for most people's definition of "rich".
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Stephen:
<quota>OK, but getting back to my original complaint: there is a difference between a) the majority of shares being owned by rich people (probably true), and b) the majority of share owners being rich people (which I doubt). If your policy aim is to put the boot into the rich, the scale of collateral damage is vastly different depending on whether b is true or not. Most of the evidence proffered in this thread addresses a, not b.</quota>The policy aim isn't to "put the boot into the rich"; its to ensure they are not disproportionately rewarded at the expense of everyone else, and that they do not get to direct the use of public assets to their own private benefit (and using the Cullen Fund to create an asset bubble on the NZSX certainly falls into the latter category).
Many rich people and ACT wannbes conflate the two, but they are not the same.
(Oh, and the Household Savings Survey data showed that 60% of shareholders were in the upper income quartile. Sadly, that's as fine as we can cut it, but it suggests that b will be false for most people's definition of "rich")
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Oh, and they're doing another waveof SOFIE at the moment (you may remember the whining in the news over the last few days), though I don't know whether it includes the asset questions or not. But we should be getting newer data sometime in the next few years.
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Danyl: KiwiSaver will certainly be changing this dismal picture, though it won't all be going into stocks (KiwiSaver providers will run a mixed portfolio). But while it will broaden indirect owneship, its not going to change the overall picture for a long time yet.
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Stephen:
Out of interest, how do you know?
Standard power law distribution. I've been digging through statsNZ looking for some neat figures, but sadly can't find any yet. But here's some scary data: According to SOFIE wave 2 (2004), 716,000 kiwis (24.4% of the population) owned financial assets, with a median value among them of $5,200 (spreadsheets here). But we know from RBNZ data (XLS) that NZers owned at least $44 billion in financial assets in 2004. That value combined with such a low median suggests we have a very uneven distribution of financial wealth.
Unfortunately, they don't have a convenient breakdown of asset ownership by oncome class (and if they did, they'd do it by quintile rather than a more detailed distribution). but the information clearly exists; it was collected, and it has been used in their report on the distribution of household wealth. The latter has some truly scary statistics, BTW: the top 25,000 families (2.5% of the population) collectively own about an eighth of NZ's net worth. And that masks the real story - that its lumping together the long tail of the power distribution.
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Andrew: if you check their source - a list of "The World’s Ugliest Elections" in Foreign Policy - they think we're "dirty" because of... Googlebombing John Key?!?
That's a long way from telling your bodyguard to drag your opponent off the debating stage and shoot them (Russia), or whipping up Islamophobia (Austria).
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But anyhoo .... "The Cullen Fund isn't there to prop up our economy" Yes, but imagine what could have been. Imagine if the Super Fund owned Telecom, Rail, BNZ, Air NZ, V/42 Below, NavMan, and Watties. We might have decent broadband, electric trains, kiwibank, an airline that serviced all parts of NZ, an international beverage brand, and crops grown in NZ again.
I'm not so sure; that would require a management culture interested in investment rather than asset-stripping, and willing to sacrifice short-term gains for longer-term returns. And since the latter is actually illegal, we'd just end up being screwed over by our own pension fund, just like people overseas have been.
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I'm stunned that Obama is ahead in the polls. I am trying not to become complacent. It could still all go horribly wrong! Wrong I say!
There's always Diebold. Or voter disenfranchisement.
As usual, I'm boggling at the practices of American political parties and wondering how the hell they get away with it? Why haven't the people said "enough!" and stuck the lot of them in jail?
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Stephen:
Idiot, why do you persist in this delusional belief that only rich people own shares?
Not "only", but certainly overwhelmingly. Your investments don't disprove the thesis one iota, any more than the old Merkin / Libertarian chestnut of one person having "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" and overcome poverty to become successful "proves" that inequality does not impose institutional barriers to success.
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Wouldn't Peter Dunne be slagging off the Maori seats as well?